Technology, skills, and the gig economy
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recently released a giant report on how information technology is influencing the US workforce. I recommend it to anyone interested in job creation, labor-force participation, economic growth, and/or technology. It’s chock-full of interesting findings and ideas for future research. Though it offers a number of reasons to worry (there’s lots of disruption underway and even more on the horizon), it does highlight one important opportunity: the “gig economy.” The report catalogs all of the ways information technology is influencing work (personal devices, network speed, videoconferencing, speech recognition, peer-to-peer networks, artificial intelligence, massive online open courses, and on and on) and argues that this will only grow. In the long term, we should expect to benefit greatly, like we did with the advent of steam engines, electricity, and computers. But we also need to be aware of the major short-term downsides, namely thousands of jobs disappearing, people losing work and struggling to find new ones, and entire industries and towns collapsing.
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